The Invasion of Ukraine One Year On: An Interview

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—This conversation took place in February 2023.

Salvage: Is Putin likely to lose this war? Until recently it seemed inconceivable. Now there have been a series of tactical routs by Ukrainian forces, and Russia’s ‘partial mobilisation’ has apparently engendered some cracks in Putin’s domestic authority without necessarily adding much to Russia’s military momentum. Is there a realistic chance now that, through military debacles or domestic breakdown, Russia loses?

Tony Wood: I would be wary of making predictions about battlefield outcomes – mainly because I’m no military expert, but also because there’s just so much contingency in the day-to-day course of any war. That said, it seems to me that the overall set-up on both sides is more likely to produce a long stalemate than a clear victory for either side. It’s certainly conceivable that Ukraine will make a breakthrough, forcing a full Russian retreat – conceivable, but unlikely. After Ukraine’s impressive advances in the late summer and autumn, Russia dug in across the Donbas, and is clearly willing to throw massive amounts of men and matériel into holding something like the current front line. Russia’s need – political and strategic – to avoid further retreats has often outweighed tactical considerations. This is also true of the war as a whole: Putin is committed to pursuing his objectives in Ukraine even at a tremendous cost to his own side. On the internal front, it seems to me that Putin is betting the war itself will stave off domestic breakdown rather than accelerate it. He may not be wrong in making that calculation, especially if the Kremlin succeeds in portraying this war of aggression as a defensive struggle against the West – a matter of ‘national survival’. This would, of course, also make it harder for opponents of the war to gain traction.

Do the criticisms of Russia’s military strategy by figures such as the Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and Evgeny Prigozhin, a Putin confidant and owner of the mercenary Wagner Group, represent a serious fissure in the regime? Is the apparently disastrous miscalculation made last February having any consequence in terms of recomposition inside the ruling bloc?

On the question of fissures: no, I don’t think so. There may be disagreements about the conduct of the war – there’s nothing like battlefield failure to prompt finger-pointing – but in terms of the rationale for the invasion, the strategic view of Russia’s place in the world, and its relation to its ‘near abroad’, the regime seems broadly unified. Prigozhin and Kadyrov are just jockeying for power and personal profit within a wide pro-war consensus. It’s true that Putin doesn’t seem to have prepared the country’s political class as a whole for this war; apparently, he only discussed it with a very narrow group of advisors. But then, the fact that everyone fell into line so quickly suggests there was little interest within the elite in opposing it. Who knows, there may be figures within the regime who think the whole project is insane and are waiting for it to end in disaster so they can crawl out of the woodwork. But I don’t think a palace coup is likely. These people know they will all go down together if Putin falls, so they are very unlikely to turn on him even if the war effort is going badly.

On recomposition within the ruling bloc: this remains to be seen, but my sense is that the war is deepening shifts that had already begun. Military spending has been on the up for several years, and the ‘power ministries’ – security services, military, intelligence – have always been prioritised under Putin. Meanwhile, the economically liberal wing of Putinism has been in retreat for at least a decade; and since 2014, economic policy has been geared to the wider imperative of withstanding Western sanctions. The war effort has accentuated all these features, though it’s true that the allocation of much larger chunks of the state budget to military procurement is making the economic weight of the military much greater. But even there, the war will not necessarily bring a full return to a Soviet-style military-industrial complex or a planned economy. A significant amount of the fighting is being subcontracted to Prigozhin’s private army, for example (which includes convicts recruited directly from Russia’s prisons). So this war is a kind of public-private partnership, redirecting yet more state revenues into oligarchic hands.

In September 2022, at the time of the partial mobilisation, there were some outbursts of popular protest and apparently spontaneous resistance to recruiters, as well as flights to the border. Has there been any sign of a broader anti-war movement in Russia, or is this still muted?

Even before the war, there were very tight restrictions on public protest in Russia, making large-scale mobilisations risky and rare. Conditions have become even more draconian since then, and though there have certainly been outbursts of resistance, as you say, I haven’t seen signs of an anti-war movement as such – that is, semi-coordinated groups of people publicly voicing the demand for a cessation of hostilities, at a minimum. This may yet emerge, of course. But the odds are stacked against it at the moment, given the repressive climate in Russia. There’s also an issue of personnel: a lot of the people one could imagine helping to organise such a movement have had to flee the country. But it’s also a wider political problem, and one those of us in the West who opposed the Iraq War should be all too familiar with: how to frame and organise mass opposition to an immoral war of aggression in conditions of generalised apathy or disengagement? And even if one succeeds, how to bring that political force to bear on the course of the conflict itself? We have to hope Russian opponents of the war can get somewhere with these problems, but it’s a very tall order.

Has Russia applied the kind of kinetic force in Ukraine that it did in Syria or Chechnya? This sort of offensive was widely predicted by anguished pundits at the outset of the war, but – notwithstanding the severely brutal attacks on some cities such as Mariupol – this doesn’t seem to have been borne out. Is that correct? And if Russia is being more restrained, why?

I wouldn’t say there has been much restraint. Russia’s large-scale attacks on Ukraine’s electricity infrastructure just as winter was setting in would be one example of mass targeting of civilians, but there have been many others. Missile attacks on urban areas have wrought very serious damage and caused a lot of casualties. People in major cities are living in the basements of bombed-out buildings, just as they did in Chechnya. And the use of ‘filtration camps’ for civilians in occupied areas is very much comparable to Russian methods in Chechnya. 

It is true that this war has not been fought from the air as much as many might have expected – at least, not by human pilots: both sides have made extensive use of drones. But it’s also true that Russia’s use of aerial power has been constrained by Ukraine’s air defences. This is a major point of contrast with Syria and Chechnya – the Ukrainians have been able to fend off a lot more of Russia’s ordnance. There may also be some strategic factors at work here. For one thing, if Russia had used massive aerial bombardments from the outset, NATO might have found it harder to resist calls for a ‘no-fly zone’, which would, of course, immediately have brought a serious escalation. So it’s possible Russia may have calibrated its approach in the early stages of the war to apply the maximum amount of force short of what NATO would consider grounds for immediate intervention. But secondly, and I think more importantly, once the initial Russian attempt to capture Kiev failed, the whole character of the war changed. In my understanding, the Russian army is much more geared to fighting this kind of long land war, and that’s certainly what has taken shape in Ukraine.

Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading oppositionist, has been in jail since January 2021. How should we understand his position at the moment? He has been opportunistic, and engaged in anti-immigrant populism in the past. His politics would appear to be broadly centre-right. Yet his defiance from his prison cell appears genuinely courageous, especially as he’s looking more emaciated. Does he have any realistic chance of leading an opposition movement? If so, how wary should we be of its politics?

Navalny is a paradoxical figure – both opportunistic and genuinely courageous, as you say. His politics have shifted a fair amount since he first came to prominence in the 2010s, from a broadly neoliberal stance framed in anti-corruption language – you could sum it up as: ‘if it weren’t for these crooks we’d have a thriving market-based system’ – to something with a more social-welfarist emphasis. One place where this became especially visible was in the platform for his 2018 presidential run (blocked by the courts): for example he raised the problem of inequality and supported increased spending on healthcare, infrastructure, and social welfare. I think he realised around then that a neoliberal programme would not be that popular outside the major urban centres, and that to gain a truly national political reach he would have to propose some kind of social agenda. This is still true, and the consequences of the war are likely to make it all the more pressing. But I don’t know that Navalny has much chance of leading a movement from jail, and it would take some major shifts for the Kremlin to let him out. I think he was well aware of this, which is what made his decision to return to Russia in early 2021 so courageous. (He had been the victim of a near-fatal poisoning attempt the previous August and had to flee to Europe for treatment. But once he recovered, he returned to Russia, and was jailed on arrival.)

As for how wary we should be, the Russian left has certainly been split on this in the past – either oppose Navalny and risk irrelevance, or support him in the hopes of shaping his agenda, but risk being dragged along by a movement with goals inimical to the left’s own. The war has rendered a lot of this moot, of course. But the fact that the Kremlin’s most significant opponent has come out against it is important. Even if Navalny’s anti-war stance is opportunistic – I can imagine a previous version of Navalny taking an equally opportunistic nationalist line, for example by supporting the war but criticising the way it’s being conducted. And Navalny’s backing would be a big plus for the Russian anti-war movement, if and when it emerges.

What should we hope for? The Western anti-war left has been split, not over whether to oppose Russian aggression, but over the degree to which we should support Ukraine (partly given Zelensky’s internally repressive behaviour), over whether to support – or at least not oppose – arms from London and Washington, and over whether it would be better for Russia to be militarily defeated (which would give the hawks in those capitals a massive boost), or for a stalemate to result in ceasefire negotiations (which might reward Russia’s actions with some territorial aggrandisements). Toward what outcome might our sympathies and efforts be best directed?

It seems to me there’s a tremendous gap between what we might minimally hope for and what is at all likely to happen – all the most probable scenarios are bleak in their different ways. Viewed in broad geopolitical terms, I can imagine some on the left wishing for a stalemate, with both Moscow’s and Washington’s plans being blocked. But while that might well be what ends up happening, it’s an unconscionable thing to wish for – it’s a terrible outcome for Ukraine, condemning the country to serve as the battleground for rival imperialisms, the Flanders Fields of the twenty-first century.

In a basic human sense, we might wish for an immediate end to hostilities and a turn to negotiations. But politically, there are some serious problems with taking such a stance now. Earlier in the war the demand for a ceasefire and negotiations might have made sense, for example when Zelensky floated the idea of neutrality plus separate talks on the status of Crimea. But both Russia and Ukraine’s Western allies rejected that, and since then the whole complexion of the war has shifted. Now it’s not clear what the parties would even discuss, so the call for negotiations is at best an abstraction. 

Russia’s annexation of the four eastern provinces in September 2022 was a turning point: it massively raised the stakes and at the same time removed any incentive for the parties to negotiate. No sovereign Ukrainian government could accept the dismemberment of the country, while Russia’s formal annexation of these territories – as opposed to occupying them for strategic leverage, say – made clear it was committed to doing precisely that. These are not negotiable positions, and something fundamental will have to change in order for either side to shift. In the short term, this could be a decisive defeat or victory for one side, in the medium to longer-term a serious challenge on the domestic front in Russia. But my fear is that we are in for a very long war of attrition, and that it will be a long time before anyone thinks of negotiations. We should, of course, continue to hope for them – but not expect them soon.

From where we now stand, it seems almost delusional to try imagining what a ‘good’ version of an eventual peace might be. But for the left, there are precedents we can draw on – ironically, in the very Leninist tradition of thinking about national self-determination whose legacy Putin is so determined to destroy. Recognition of Ukraine’s sovereignty and right to democratic self-determination, allied to a rejection of what Lenin termed ‘Great Russian chauvinism’, would be the basic starting point. But it would be vital for the application of this principle to be accompanied by a process of democratic self-determination in Russia itself – unshackling popular sovereignty in order to curb Russian imperial ambitions. All of this runs directly counter to the current thinking of Russia’s entire political class. So beyond hoping for their military failure in Ukraine, the left should hope for a broader transformation from within that dethrones their entire worldview. But again, this all seems very far-fetched from the standpoint of the present.

Following on from the previous question, would you agree that this situation gives an example of the limits of an – understandable! – internationalist left desire to ‘call for’ things, or ‘oppose’ things? Of course, we often rightly have to take positions we have little to no immediate chance of enacting and which outline a politics of radical solidarity: for example, in welcoming refugees from the – any – war. But there are concrete situations which will not resolve into any ‘least bad’ option for which we might ‘call’ in geopolitical and/or ‘kinetic’ terms. For example, if we allow that Ukraine has the right to resistance, it’s hard to see the ‘harm reduction’ position many on the left have taken in firmly opposing any arms supplies to Ukraine as not amounting to a position that ‘Ukraine has the right to resist, but the least-bad option will be if it loses quickly’. Conversely, to actively cheerlead arms-sales to Ukraine, let alone to ‘demand’ them, undoubtedly cleaves with the agenda of Euro-American imperialism. Can such circles be squared? In such a situation, the left can analyse and stand in solidarity, but, absent mass radical pressure, can we meaningfully ‘demand’ anything geopolitical or kinetic when the options and agents available to enact any such demands are inimical to freedom?

It’s certainly true that the left’s positions on this war are irrelevant to how it will unfold. Though I’m sure Ukrainians will welcome solidarity in all its forms, the question of whether the left opposes or supports a given course of action is mainly significant in terms of its internal repercussions. Which is not to say it’s not important: there is a genuine need here to think through what principles are at stake, what the left values or wants to defend. I’ve mentioned the concept of self-determination, which is central to my thinking about this – I see it as the core of any tenable peace, but also as an inherent political good in itself.

Yet in the absence of mass radical pressure, it is also fraught with dangers, as the example of the former Yugoslavia shows. Many observers have noted that the war in Ukraine could be seen as a much-delayed war of Soviet succession, equivalent to the 1990s conflicts in the Balkans. This raises a larger analytical point that bodes ill for the post-Soviet space as a whole: in a longer-run perspective, one might argue that the former Russian empire has yet to complete the whole process of nation-state formation that ravaged the rest of Europe for centuries. The Soviet model both arrested and assisted the development of many diverse nationalisms across the USSR’s breadth; with that system’s collapse, we have seen the development of new nation-states – now in neoliberal conditions, sundered from any idea of social transformation, as Volodymyr Ishchenko and others have observed. What this means, I fear, is that the war in Ukraine may only be the prototype for a string of wars in which similar dilemmas will apply. 

A major part of the problem here is that such wars will mostly be waged in terms alien to the left, pitting rival nationalisms and imperialisms against each other. In the case of Ukraine, its entirely legitimate struggle for national self-defence has become entangled with the US’ project of global dominance, which the left naturally opposes, facing off against a Russian neo-imperial advance, which the left also opposes – hence the unsquarable circles you mention. But if the left was more powerful, the dilemmas might if anything be more severe. The example of the European Social-Democrats voting for war credits in 1914 springs to mind – a salutary reminder of what can happen to even a large and organised mass movement in conditions of inter-imperial warfare. But perhaps there’s also something useful to be gleaned from that historical moment, in terms of the need for the left to escape the geopolitical logic of inter-imperial contention – that is, to make its demands not within that framework, for or against a given position, but to transcend it, while still acting in solidarity with those most oppressed by it. I’m obviously not suggesting that we should just rehash the Bolsheviks’ ‘Peace, Land and Bread’ agenda of 1917, or that we can magic up a new iteration of the Zimmerwald left’s class-based, internationalist opposition to the First World War. But it’s worth thinking about what would be the functional equivalents in our times of those radical acts of systemic reimagination.

Tony Wood teaches history at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Chechnya: The Case for Independence (Verso, 2007) and Russia without Putin: Money, Power and the Myths of the New Cold War (Verso, 2018). He is a member of the editorial board of New Left Review, and has written on a range of subjects for the London Review of Books, n+1, the Nation, and the Guardian, among other outlets.